EU lawmaker says Bush govt ‘lied’ over CIA prisons
BRUSSELS, Sept 14: A European parliamentarian probing suspected secret CIA prisons on Thursday denounced US President George Bush and members of his administration as liars.
“I am stunned that he lied to us for months. Mrs (US Secretary of State Condoleezza) Rice lied to the European Council,” Italian socialist deputy Claudio Fava told other members of the investigating commission.
“We have to find out where these prisons were. We have to go beyond the American administration’s wall of lies,” he said.
Mr Bush admitted last week for the first time that the US Central Intelligence Agency covertly held prisoners in overseas camps, reports of which had been publicly denied by many of the countries involved.
The US president also defended the interrogation tactics used by the CIA.
The lawmaker leading the probe, Portuguese deputy Carlo Coelho, said that Mr Bush’s remarks ‘signify that we were right to set up this investigating commission’.
German Socialist Wolfgang Kreissl-Doerfer called on European Union foreign ministers, meeting in Brussels on Friday, to say clearly whether such prisons exist on European soil.
“I’m sure that the members of the council (of EU ministers) know much more than they want to say,” he said.
SPAIN AS STOPOVER: Spain may have been a stopover for secret CIA flights but there is no evidence that violations of international law were committed on its soil, Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos said on Thursday.
He was the first minister to testify before a European Parliament panel investigating allegations that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency ran secret prisons for terrorism suspects in Europe and flew suspects to states where they could be tortured.
“Our territory may have been used not to commit crimes as such but as a stopover on the way to commit crime in other territories,” Mr Moratinos said, adding that 66 suspect flights had made stops in Spain.
“According to all information available to the Spanish government at this moment ... there has not been any violation of Spanish law as regards CIA flights since this government came into office (March 2004),” he added.
A report by Dick Marty, an investigator from the human rights watchdog, the Council of Europe, said earlier this year the Spanish airport of Palma de Majorca was one of eight international ‘staging points’ for secret prisoner transfers.
A Spanish judge opened an investigation in June to determine whether suspects on secret CIA flights which touched down in Majorca were held illegally or tortured, court officials said at the time.
SUSPICIOUS FLIGHTS: Mr Moratinos said the American authorities had assured Spain that there had been no secret passengers aboard planes transiting in Spain. The Spanish intelligence service have found no evidence of violation or crime during CIA stopovers, he said.
Nevertheless, Spanish authorities were investigating flights which could have been used to detain or fly prisoners before or after the stopover in Spain, he said.—AFP/Reuters
